![\"Tony's](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/files\/2016\/03\/Tonys-barbershop-600x450.jpg\")
When I asked clients of one men\u2019s salon, The Executive, if they ever had their hair cut at a barbershop, they explained that they did not fit the demographic. Barbershops, they said, are for old men with little hair to worry about or young boys who don\u2019t have anyone to impress. As professional white-collar men, they see themselves as having outgrown the barbershop. A salon, with its focus on detailed haircuts and various services, including manicures, pedicures, hair coloring, and body waxing, help these mostly white men to obtain what they consider to be a \u201cprofessional\u201d appearance. \u201cProfessional men\u2026 they know that if they look successful, that will create connotations to their clients or customers or others that they work with\u2014that they are smart, that they know what they\u2019re doing,\u201d said Gill, a client of the salon and vice-president in software, who reasoned why men go to\u00a0the salon.<\/p>\n
Indeed the numbers support the claim that barbershops are dwindling, and it may indeed\u00a0be due to white well-to-do men\u2019s shifting attitudes about what a barbershop is, what it can offer, and who goes there. (In my earlier research on a small women\u2019s salon [see here<\/a>], one male client told me the barbershop is a place for the mechanic, or \u201cgrease-monkey,\u201d who doesn\u2019t care how he looks, and for \u201cmachismo\u201d men who prefer a pile of Playboy magazines rather than the finery of a salon). According to Census data,\u00a0there is a fairly steady decline\u00a0in the number of barbershops over twenty years. From 1992-2012, we saw a 22.5% decrease in barbershops in the United Stated, with a slight uptick in 2013.<\/p>\n But these attitudes about the barbershop as a place of ol\u2019, as a fading institution that provides outdated fades, is both a classed and raced attitude. With all the nostalgia for the barbershop in American culture, there is surprisingly little academic writing\u00a0about it. It is telling, though, that research considering the importance of the barbershop in men\u2019s lives focuses on black barbershops. The corner barbershop is alive and well in black communities and it serves an important role in the lives of black men. In her book, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET<\/a><\/em>, Political Scientist and TV host, Melissa Harris-Perry, wrote about everyday barbershop talk as important for understanding collective efforts to frame black political thought. Scholars also find the black barbershop remains an important site for building communities and economies in black neighborhoods and for socializing young black boys (see here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n And so asking if the barbershop is vanishing is the wrong question. Rather, we should be asking: Where and for whom is the barbershop vanishing? And where barbershops continue as staples of a community, what purpose do they serve? Where they are disappearing, what is replacing them and what are the social relations underpinning the emergence of these new places?<\/p>\n In some white hipster neighborhoods, the barbershop is actually making a comeback. In his article, What the Barbershop Renaissance Says about Men<\/a>, journalist and popular masculinities commentator, Thomas Page McBee, writes that these places provide sensory pleasures whereby men can channel a masculinity that existed unfettered in the \u201cgood old days.\u201d The smell of talcum powder and the presence of shaving mugs help men to grapple with what it means to be a man at a time when masculinity is up for debate. But in a barbershop\u00a0that charges $45 for a haircut, some men are left out. And so, in a place that engages tensions between ideas of nostalgic masculinity and a new sort of progressive man, we may very well see opportunities for real change fall by the wayside. The hipster phenomenon, after all, is a largely white one that appropriates symbols of white working-class masculinity: think white tank tops with tattoos or the plaid shirts of lumbersexuals. (See Tristan Bridges’ posts\u00a0on hipster masculinity<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0the\u00a0borrowing of\u00a0working-class masculine aesthetics<\/a>, and his post with D’Lane Compton on the lumbersexual<\/a>).<\/p>\n![\"U.S.](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/files\/2016\/03\/Barber-Shop-Graph-1992-2013-1-600x244.jpg\")